Entries to Natural Order are dedicated to promoting an open & free society.

Monthly Archives: May 2014

“The preservation of a free system is so difficult precisely because it requires a constant rejection of measures which appear to be required to secure particular results, on no stronger grounds than that they conflict with a general rule [of non-government intervention], and frequently without our knowing what will be the costs of not observing the rule in the particular instance. A successful defense of freedom must therefore be dogmatic & make no concessions to expediency, even where it is not possible to show that, besides the known beneficial effects, some particular harmful result would also follow from its infringement. Freedom will prevail only if it is accepted as a general principle whose application to particular instances requires no justification. It is thus a misunderstanding to blame classical liberalism for having been too doctrinaire. Its defect was not that it adhered too stubbornly to principles, but rather that it lacked principles sufficiently definite to provide clear guidance . . . .”

“People will not refrain from those restrictions on individual liberty that appear to them the simplest & most direct remedy of a recognized evil, if there does not prevail a strong belief in definite principles. The loss of such belief & the preference for expediency is no part the result of the fact that we no longer have any principles that can be rationally defended.”

Seeking to fulfill one’s own life purpose, guided by purposive self interest, leads to an imperative to cooperate with other individuals that are carrying on in much the same manner.

In turn, this leads us, each & all, to seek out & engage in market exchanges that are an instrument of individual empowerment that tend to lead to a “just” social order given that these outcomes (transfers) emerge out of voluntary consent.

Alas, most social scientists focus on collectivist views that model a forest while failing to grasp the importance of nurturing the (individual) trees.

As such, it is naive & misleading to speak of markets as involving atomistic individuals when markets are the outcome of humans acting to seek cooperative arrangements with other humans.